Abstract
Each winter, tens of thousands of destitute Mongolian herders move to the insalubrious suburbs that surround Ulaanbaatar (“ger districts”). This migration can partly be attributed to climate change, as a rapid warming and a slight change in the precipitation patterns (decrease in summer precipitations) reduce the yield of the grassland. On the other hand, the resilience of nomadic animal husbandry declined markedly since the collapse of the communist regime in 1990: the “Age of the Market” and the imposition of a radical neoliberal ideology led to the interruption of the services indispensable to the traditional Mongolian way of life (e.g. boarding schools, mobile health brigades, but also veterinary services and a centralized system of fodder production and distribution that mutualizes environmental risks). Thus, this chapter shows that, in the context of Mongolia’s internal migration, climate change adaptation is inseparable from domestic development policies that, it is argued, need urgently to be rectified.
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- 1.
“Ger” (yurt) is the traditional tent in which the Mongolian nomads live. Many destitute internal migrants settle around Ulaanbaatar in their “ger,” hence the name “ger districts.”
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is the product of a visit of Mongolia in March–April 2013. This research was permitted by the financial support provided by the McGill Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, by the logistical support offered by the local office of the International Organization for Migration in Ulaanbaatar and by the library of the American Center for Mongolian Studies, and by the availability and kindness of about 50 interviewees.
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Mayer, B. (2015). Managing “Climate Migration” in Mongolia: The Importance of Development Policies. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Climate Change in the Asia-Pacific Region. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14938-7_12
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